1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to data mining.
2. Background Art
Landmarks can include easily recognizable, well-known places and buildings, such as, for example, monuments, churches, historical sites, and seats of government. For tourists, visiting landmarks may be important parts of their tours. For this reason, tourists often take photographs or videos of landmarks. Many tourists share their photographs over the Internet through photo-sharing websites, such as a PICASA WEB site.
Automatically recognizing landmarks in images and videos is useful for several reasons. First, by capturing the visual characteristics of landmarks, a landmark recognition engine may identify clean, unobscured landmark images. The clean landmark images may be used in virtual tourism to simulate a tour for a user. Second, a landmark recognition engine may be used to geolocate media and to generate a description of media content. Third, a landmark recognition engine may be used to catalogue media by landmark. When media are catalogued by landmark, they may be used, for example, to provide tour guide recommendations.
To recognize a landmark, a landmark recognition engine correlates an image of a landmark with known images of the landmark. To make the correlation, the landmark recognition engine needs a visual model based on or comprised of known images of the landmark. Thus, a landmark recognition engine relies on a landmark database with a listing of landmarks and corresponding visual models to recognize landmarks.
At present, efforts to automatically generate a landmark database have used data from photo-sharing websites. While this approach has advantages, the resulting landmark database tends to be biased to the interests of a particular user group.
Systems and methods are needed that build a large, comprehensive landmark database from a broader range of publicly available photos.